CVE-2026-115697
Description
A flaw was found in iwd. An unauthenticated adjacent attacker can transmit a specially crafted Wi-Fi beacon frame containing a malformed High Efficiency (HE) Capabilities element. Due to an incorrect byte offset check during frame validation, length verification succeeds and triggers an out-of-bounds read of adjacent memory. This flaw allows an attacker to influence connection rate estimation and alter network selection ranking.
Statement
This vulnerability is rated as Low impact because exploitation is constrained to adjacent wireless proximity and only alters network selection ranking heuristics, without leading to denial of service or information disclosure. Additionally, iwd is not packaged or supported within Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which employs wpa_supplicant for Wi-Fi management. As a result, standard enterprise deployments are unaffected by this flaw.
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Read Memory
An attacker could get secret values such as cryptographic keys, PII, memory addresses, or other information that could be used in additional attacks.
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Bypass Protection Mechanism
Out-of-bounds memory could contain memory addresses or other information that can be used to bypass ASLR and other protection mechanisms in order to improve the reliability of exploiting a separate weakness for code execution.
Availability
Technical Impact: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
An attacker could cause a segmentation fault or crash by causing memory to be read outside of the bounds of the buffer. This is especially likely when the code reads a variable amount of data and assumes that a sentinel exists to stop the read operation, such as a NUL in a string.
Other
Technical Impact: Varies by Context
The read operation could produce other undefined or unexpected results.
Acknowledgements
Red Hat would like to thank Abhinav Agarwal for reporting this issue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not sure what something means? Check out our Security Glossary.
Want to get errata notifications? Sign up here.
